


A Sinking Star

by Oparu



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2018-01-01 00:02:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oparu/pseuds/Oparu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Kathryn Janeway, the Borg will adapt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sinking Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miri Cleo (miri_cleo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miri_cleo/gifts).



She doesn't believe it. The Borg march through the corridors of _Voyager_ , metal toes slamming onto her deck, but somehow, even when they take the bridge, Kathryn can't believe. They've fought, long and hard, bloody, battered and weeping and they'll win in the end. 

They have to win in the end. Heroes win, sacrifices are rewarded; she promised her crew they would go home. 

They don't. 

She watches death come for her crew. Tears sting but the pain fades into the horror of burning flesh, scorched lungs and flame. The burning carpet licks at her feet, roasting her skin within her boots. In that hell of pain and fire, the Borg are saviours. Angels of death promising an end to torment. 

Peace replaces fear. In the eyes of her crew, over and over around her, the peace of the Borg, unchanging, still, overtakes the terror and agony of losing. With the self gone, there can be only peace. 

No peace comes for her. The drone drags her out of her chair, slams her knees to the sizzling deck. No nanotubes reach for her neck, no intoxicating loss of self comes for her. Not even as her beloved crew, her family, chokes away the last of their individuality beside her. 

The viewscreen, awash in green, shows the cube bringing them in. _Home. She promised them home._

The transport whines, threatening to take her from her ship, but instead slim feet encased in dark metal come for her. The fires die. Her crew stands around her, machine merging with flesh. One of Chakotay's dark eyes pops from within, covering itself with a superior mechanical viewer. Blood and viscera runs down his grey skin, like tears.

Are her own tears blood? It would be cheap for only water to run down her face when her crew has given so much. 

Hands lift her chin. She could fight, keeping her eyes down on her wrecked uniform or she could go home. Her crew is gone. They're one with the Borg now. Why has she been denied that privilege? As Borg, she'd know them, hear their grief. 

Would they know her anguish? Or worse, her defeat. She knew she'd never make good on the promise she made. Home was too far. She was foolish, too proud to admit defeat and let them build a life. She brought them to this. 

_Home_. 

She's never been able to give them the kind of mindless peace they feel now. Hands pull her to her feet, asking her to stop her worship of the demons who've won. She can't. She is not equal to the dark form in front of her; she will not look it in the eye. 

"Captain Janeway."

She's never believed in gods and demons. She studied the old texts, learned the gods of history, but she was never a woman of faith. Is it that lack of belief that doomed her? If she'd believed in a god, would she be in front of the demon know? 

Expecting the voice in her mind, she steels herself to drown it out. She owes her crew that much. She will suffer, struggling in agony because they deserve her pain. She's failed them in so many ways, the least she can give them is the shared knowledge of her suffering. She'll fight because that's what they'd want of her. 

"Kathryn."

Why isn't the voice in her head? Why haven't the tubules pierced her neck and ended it? Where's the insanity she wants? The chance of surrender that her crew had? She'll fight, she owes her crew a fight, but in the end she'll lose and it'll be quiet. Finally. 

Her voice shatters the calm of _Voyager_ 's dead bridge. "No." 

The Queen kneels, sharing the deck with Kathryn. Instead of dragging her up, taking her, the demon, the darkness, the end of all things, looks her in the eye. 

"No?"

"I-" Kathryn coughs. Blood marks her hand. How damaged are her lungs? How badly did she burn? If she delays, can she escape into death? Would that make her a coward for escaping when her crew could not? 

"I will resist," she finishes. Wiping blood from her hand to her ashen uniform, she finds the strength to hold up her head. 

"Of course you will." The Queen leans closer, dark silken lips just millimetres from Kathryn's own. 

"Resistance is not--" Kathryn lies. The futility is what makes it attractive. The promise of freedom from responsibility washes over her like a song. Give in and she'll be free of the burden of the hundred forty lives she led out here to die. She'll resist to cleanse herself and her crew. If she fights longer and harder of any of them, then they can forgive themselves because she is their leader and even she failed. 

The Queen tilts her head, baring her neck, promising release from responsibility. Pain will free her.

* * *

Screaming through her quarters, Red Alert wakes her from the nightmare. Kathryn doesn't even cry out into the darkness this time because she can still feel the Queen's hands on her neck, soft and gentle, like a lover. Falling to her feet from the bed, she pulls her uniform jacket on over the filthy uniform she's slept in for the last few days and heads to the bridge. 

Straightening in the corridor, she drags her hand through her hair. The Queen's fingers linger behind her own, promising comfort in a galaxy without mercy. This slow death must be worse than a collective life. She lost four more yesterday, and they were too exhausted to do more than store the bodies. She need to write words and speak a useless litany over the corpses of the latest of her crew to find freedom. 

There's no freedom for her, or any of the exhausted faces on the bridge. Chakotay's still in sickbay, lying in stasis with the rest of the injuries the Doctor can't yet find time to heal. B'Elanna and Seven are in engineering, keeping her ship together with blood and prayer. The rest of her crew sit at their posts. Tom's skin barely starting to heal, Harry's eyes sunken into his face while exhaustion makes him old. 

Tuvok reports that the Borg ship that's found them is a cube.

It's a sphere. She knows that. Why do the sensors lie? Is this the game they have to play with themselves?

 _"Kathryn."_ The Queen reverberates through her, like an explosion throwing her to the deck. No one else hears. They hold their positions, living corpses waiting for her words. 

"Hail them."

Harry blinks. Perhaps he sees two of her. "Captain?"

"How long can we keep running, Mr. Tuvok?"

He can't even soften it with logical optimism any more. Half their decks are shut down, most of the crew sleeps in the corridors, the mess hall and the cargo bay because life support is too much of a drain when they need shields and warp power. 

"It is improbable that we have survived this long."

"Captain, you can't negotiate with the Borg."

She sits forward, forcing her exhausted vertebrae to lock and hold her up. "Can't I? We shouldn't be able to fight them, Mr. Paris, but we have. We shouldn't have been able to run, but we did."

Belief settles over them. Her lies give them strength. She looses more of herself each time she does it but they are her crew. 

"Borg Vessel--"

"You are Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation Starship _Voyager_. You will lower your shields and surrender--"

"My vessel, I know, I know. I'm afraid that's not what I called to talk about today."

"Yourself," The Borg finish, unperturbed by her bravado. 

"Captain?" Harry asks. 

Tom whirls in his chair, staring at her. Tuvok's eyes raise from his panel. 

"What?"

"You will surrender yourself, Captain Kathryn Janeway, for negotiations."

Her crew waits to protest around her, arguing with their eyes that she can't, she mustn't, it's a trap. What no one seems to understand but Tuvok is that she'd walk into any number of traps for her crew. 

"I'll need some assurances."

"While Kathryn Janeway is negotiating _Voyager_ will be permitted safe passage through Borg space."

Leaning back, she summons the last of her cocky disregard. "You can do better."

The view into the cube hums and lights move within the ship, almost as if she can see the neurons flash. 

Then she- the voice of the Borg- the one who is many, speaks. 

"I see impatience is a human trait you are fond of, Captain. You begin negotiating before you've even left the ship."

"You will use your transwarp conduits to safely bring _Voyager_ to the edge of Borg space, closer to Earth."

"You don't want to be closer?" The Queen's voice echoes through her ship and the lights move in time with her, because she is the Borg. "Closer to Earth? To your home?"

Kathryn doesn't want to think how close the Borg could get them to home. Not acknowledging how close to their doorstep their greatest enemy can be doesn't save her. Maybe she owes that to her crew. Yet, it's what the Queen wants, and Kathryn's not ready to give her that. 

"The edge of Borg space will do, thank you."

"Captain--" Harry's voice hisses behind her. Tuvok hushes him with a look. 

"You may transport me in one minute," Kathryn tells the Queen. "If that suits you."

"One of your minutes, captain."

Everyone starts to protest at once around her and she stands, holding up a hand to quiet them all. 

"I only have a minute. Let's not waste it arguing." She looks from one to the other, a proud, exhausted mother seeing the best of herself in her children. They've come so far, so much further than she ever did. There's a purity to their journey because it has always been her fault they are here. She trapped them, she's the villain and her crew are the heroes. 

"I don't know what the Borg want," she begins. "But we stand a far better chance talking to them than fighting. Our resources are almost spent, we're losing lives every other day, we have to negotiate, find another way through or there's not going to be anything left of us to get home."

"Captain--"

"No arguments, Tuvok," she says. Then she smiles at him because he's the one who knows her best. Chakotay might love her, but Tuvok knows her faults. There will be no fight. No foolish choices to save the lamb from slaughter. If she must go, part of her longs for it, she will go proudly. 

When heroes fall, they fall like angels, tempted and torn. Is that why no fear dogs her feet as she walks towards the screen? Fear is her constant companion, but now her heart quiets. Herself for her crew is a good trade. She's prayed for it, wanting any chance to give herself up, to take the sin that has always been hers. 

She smiles at them, her family on the bridge, and hopes Seven and B'Elanna will understand why she couldn't say good bye. 

The Borg transporter takes her like a lover's embrace, pulling her tight. She wonders if all those about to die felt this peace. Is this the end? Has exhaustion finally driven her beyond sanity? She's flirted with the brink before and perhaps this is the last act of an insane woman, pushed past her own limits. She's failed to be superhuman, and that's what captains must be, especially here when the Federation begins and ends with her. She's been everything for her crew, but it's never enough. 

Standing in a pool of light on the black deck, she waits for a Borg escort who never arrives. The cube breathes and hums around her; hot, damp air caressing her skin. Sinking to her knees on the deck, she surrenders pretence the way she longs to surrender everything else. There's no fight left. If the Queen wants to kill her, she welcomes the pain, the expiation and the end. 

More than anything, she wants the end, craves it. 

Yet the hands on her skin feel human, warm and familiar. Her mother had hands that small. 

"Captain."

"Call me Kathryn." Let her die that way at least. Kathryn still exists, somewhere beneath _Voyager_. She's as much part of her vessel and crew as the Queen is, but the Borg are honest in their devouring. She never meant to lose herself, but that was what they needed, what the universe demanded of her. 

"What do you want, Kathryn?" The Queen leans down, her lips brushing Kathryn's neck. 

"My crew must go home."

Removing her insignia from her chest, the Queen tosses it aside then tilts her head. The entire being of the Borg listens to her, doing her bidding. 

"Done."

"Done?"

The Queen raises a hologram, showing _Voyager_ 's flight through the livid green transwarp conduit. "They will shortly arrive within your Federation's space."

"You could have done that all along?" Kathryn grabs her hand and twists it back from her chest. Anger flares where she thought nothing remained. She bends the Queen's hand back, pushing, longing to snap the ligaments and bone--

If the Queen is made of such things. 

"You did not ask, Kathryn." Dark lips reach for hers, scalding when they connect. She still has the Queen's arm, but it doesn't matter, the Queen is more than flesh, more than metal, she is everything. 

Kathryn waits for the nanites, the change that will finally remove her sins, but it does not come. The Queen strips her, whittling her down to her humanity with none of the uniform to hide behind. She's not sure if the Queen's black suit is mechanical skin or if there's something beneath it. Does the Queen even need her naked to kill her? 

There's no death. That pleasure the Queen retains for herself, but she brings other gifts. She touches Kathryn's body, and enters her mind, caressing her thoughts without judgement. She wants to be judged, to be punished and forgiven, but such things are outside of the morality of the Borg. The Queen is all, and Kathryn is one of many, but still one.

One with the Queen's lips on hers, her fingers within and her mind promising that the universe is full of wonders. Kathryn dies a little, but she lives.

**Author's Note:**

> I think it would take a great darkness to drive Kathryn to the Queen and I wrote this to explore that. I hope it's all right.


End file.
